Leaderboard


Popular Content

Showing content with the highest reputation on 05/10/2021 in all areas

  1. 4 points
    I disagree with just about all of Rep. Cheney's policy positions, but to punish her for not promoting a huge lie is about as low as you can go.
  2. 1 point
    There is an app called spot assist that is advertised (among other things) to help find cutaway canopies and freebags.
  3. 1 point
    Don't know where you are exactly but another option is Cark in the Lake District. That or Peterlee are nice DZs.
  4. 1 point
    Yep. Were you gullible enough to believe that when Trump passed the corporate tax cuts, the companies passed those savings on in the form of lower consumer product pricing and higher wages? You know where most of that tax cut went? Executive bonuses and stock buybacks. So yes, the corporations may have to pay a few million less to their top execs, or perhaps not buy back their own stock to pump up the price. O the humanity.
  5. 1 point
    If the most if us are either bum fuck crazy, delusional or open to believing the most absurd propositions, and I dare you to argue otherwise, would it still be a people problem? We don't let kids drive for a reason, right? I mean surely there are quite a few who could handle it at 10 years old, yes? It was an admittedly poor attempt at sarcasm. My daughter was driving our street legal golf cart, then the cops showed up at my house. I'm all puffed up right, because I made sure with the Police Chief that it was all legal - right down to her taking a golf cart safety course. I'm thinking someone reported her and they were WRONG!. She'd busted through a stop sign WHILE on her phone. Damn criminals.
  6. 1 point
    The problem is that many of those ways are not quite legal - but are not illegal, either. For example, let's say you create a 501c3 private foundation, intended to run a museum. The museum is in a building you purchase. You have a few things on exhibit, all relatively cheap art that you like. You also have a back room with an entertainment space where you hold parties for donors, who are all your friends, and who rarely donate. Big TV, an open bar, stripper poles. The money in this foundation pays for the purchase of the property, utilities, for catering supplies for your parties, and for travel expenses that allow to fly first class all over the world to buy art you like. You contribute your ordinary pay check to this foundation, and thus deduct all your income. That is all technically legal. It is also a way to party and travel all over the world tax free. You can't get away with this, of course, unless you have those clever accountants you mention. But if you are making $500K a year, the $185,000 you save on taxes pays for a lot of creative accounting.
  7. 1 point
    More: https://news.yahoo.com/richest-americans-dont-report-least-054441854.html The top 1 percent of U.S. households don't report about 21 percent of their income, and a big slice of that — 6 percentage points — is from sophisticated tax-avoidance strategies that aren't detected in spot IRS audits, The Wall Street Journal reports. The top 0.1 percent of households may hide nearly twice the amount of income projected by conventional IRS methodologies, the researchers found.
  8. 1 point
    What? If entitlement of the wealthy was challenged by investigation and enforcement? If the use of lawyers in courts by the wealthy. To wear down the limited funding of the IRS to use the courts to pursue delinquents and tax cheats. Was finally brought to an even balance. First we have trusts: "Jeffrey Epstein signed new will to shield $577m fortune days before death. Financier created trust fund in new will two days before suicide. Experts say prying open fund will be difficult for accusers" "The sex-trafficking scandal surrounding the late Jeffrey Epstein already has tarnished the reputations of prominent politicians, businessmen, and the British royal family. Now it’s casting a dark shadow on an estate tax-avoidance strategy popular among Wall Street CEOs and tech entrepreneurs. The strategy exploits a loophole that Congress unintentionally left open when it passed provisions related to grantor retained annuity trusts, or GRATs, in 1990. Use of these trusts already has cost the IRS—by one estimate—well over $100 billion in just the last two decades. A recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management reveals that the firm’s longtime CEO, Leon Black, relied on Epstein’s assistance to extract more than $500 million of tax savings from GRATs." Finally we have trump: How the Trump Family Used GRATs for Massive Tax Savings
  9. 1 point
    What's the motivation for being honest if the probability of being audited is negligibly small? The Congress, which has been bought and paid for by the very wealthy, has clearly drafted the tax laws with its paymasters as the beneficiaries.
  10. 1 point
    Hi Wendy, In the 1986 tax legislation overhaul bill, Sen Bob Packwood (R-OR), head of the Senate committee writing the legislation, put in just a couple of lines to benefit a campaign donator. She was a wealthy Texan, who benefitted to the tune of about $500,000 because of this. She was the only person in the US who benefitted from it. Jerry Baumchen
  11. 1 point
    Meanwhile the IRS, has caused me grief THREE TIMES over the last dozen years! Two of those were audits, for no apparent reason. I had not made made any unauthorized deductions, and I did not owe them any money. The third (last year) was a doozy; They demanded that I prove my identity. Now they have a website just for this purpose, but apparently my case raised such huge red flags that I was not allowed to use it. No, they demanded I make a phone call directly to one of their people. Have you ever tried to call in and speak to an IRS agent? It took many hours over two days to reach one. At the end of a lengthy call, they decided I really was who I claimed to be. So I just had to ask them: Do you guys really have an ongoing problem with people sending in tax payments for other people? I had not had a refund in years, but had just sent in a big tax payment for 2019, and was sending in quarterly estimated payments for 2020.
  • Newsletter

    Want to keep up to date with all our latest news and information?
    Sign Up